Many diseases and health conditions cause changes in facial dimensions. For example, humans afflicted by brain and cranial nerve tumors, Cushing's disease, acromegaly, certain type of stroke or brain infection, etc., exhibit significant changes in facial dimensions over the course of time. Drug abuse by chemicals such as steroids, opiates, etc., also cause significant changes in facial dimensions over the course of time. In one example, over 250,000 people are newly diagnosed with brain tumor related medical conditions every year. Some brain tumor conditions have a time to diagnosis of up to seven years. Thus, brain tumor conditions often remain undiagnosed for several years. The long intervening period between onset and diagnosis often limits treatment options, decreases effectivity, and dramatically increases overall treatment cost. In addition, patients treated for the removal of tumors are monitored for disease recurrence by expensive, time consuming, and stressful blood and imaging (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging) tests.
If facial dimensions are considered at all in a day-to-day medical practice, typically, facial dimensions are examined visually by a physician at the time of a patient visit. Visible facial distortions may be employed by a doctor as one of many clues in a medical diagnosis. However, it is not common for physicians to perform measurements of facial dimensions and track changes in measurements of facial dimensions over time as part of a medical diagnosis. As the retrospective data is typically unavailable, physicians do not use precise measurement and tracking of facial dimensions as part of a medical diagnosis. Small changes in facial dimensions pass unnoticed by a physician in a typical clinical setting. As a result, an often leading indicator of disease is often ignored until a significant period of time passes after onset of the disease.
Improvements in patient health monitoring systems are desired. In particular, improvements in image collection and analysis for medical diagnoses are desired.